Drowning in the Next Room
by Tinhen
Summary: In the morning you're a child, happy and free. In the afternoon, you're an adult and you're breathing but the life inside is fading. In the evening, well, in the evening you lie down to die. That's your life in one day. That's one day of your life.
1. Cold

Drowning In the Next Room

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Section One of Three

Summary: In the morning you're a child, happy and free. In the afternoon, you're an adult and you're breathing but the life inside is fading. In the evening, well, in the evening you lie down to die. That's your life in one day. That's one day of your life. An exercise in style [stark/dreamscape/anon]. [future:lit.rambler]

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Note: Stark means that certain details were kept skeletal. That makes the prose more visceral. That makes it all more rigid, and somehow still able to have an intense emotional impact. Dreamscape is the use of more otherworldly-sounding words to describe things, like calling baby blue something like lullaby blue. Anon is the technique in which the main characters have no names, but clues are given as to their identities. It should be pretty easy but whine all you want if you can't figure it out.

*

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It was easy when you were younger. You could put it back together.

The coffee table pushed up against the wall had an odd, if not quaint, assortment of things stacked or grouped meticulously upon it. There was a stack of those expensive cooking magazines, strange, because no one in the house much liked to cook. Beside those was a remote control to the broken stereo in the opposite corner. A small can of paint with a dry scarlet drip down its side but no accompanying paint brush. A small, dirty hand mirror. A shoebox half-filled with old black socks, half-filled with small plastic baggies that contained two sky-blue or two pale yellow pills each (that would be Valium). A coiled leather dog lead, wrapped around a small, chipped porcelain teapot missing its lid. Several dollars in change inside the teapot. Two stacks of twenty-dollar bills, each about two inches high. The bills were varying stages of newness, so the exact amounts in each stack was probably different. Underneath the table was another shoebox, this one with a lid masking its contents.

A little boy about five years of age, wearing green footed pajamas with moose and gift boxes on them, sat Indian-style on the floor three feet to the left of the coffee table, a messily-wrapped Christmas gift in his lap. The shiny blue-and-white paper was still whole; he was staring out the sliding glass door that led out a small concrete terrace and looked out on a distant corner of the city. He was thinking about the future, as much of it as he could fold to fit into his five-year-old brain. He wasn't thinking about his parents, his father, the writer slash drug-dealer-to-the-stars; his mother, the saddest, prettiest woman he'd ever met. He never thought about his parents much, since they didn't think about him much. 

His mother wasn't home, not even on Christmas Day. Neither he nor his father knew where she went when she left, just that she was almost alive when she came home. The life, however, would fade gradually with every breath she took, and then she would be back to the woman sitting on the futon in the corner with a book on her lap, open but pages down against her jeans, vacant desire in her eyes.

His father was in bed still, though it was past noon, sleeping off the hangover he'd accrued the previous night at whatever club he'd gone to set up his shady business in. Before sitting down in front of the artificial, silver, 1950's relic tree they'd bought at a garage sale when the boy was three ("It's important for a kid to have a tree once he's old enough to remember," his father had said. His mother had just nodded and stared out the car window at the bleached-out winter scenery), he had peeked into his parents' room to see his father lying on top of the covers. His father's dark hair was too long again and covered his hollow, pale face as he slept on his stomach. He hadn't bothered to change out of the previous night's clothes. The boy's mother hadn't come home at all that night.

The boy had opened three of his five presents. The first was a huge box, all shrink-wrapped and gorgeously plastic-packed, full of a few dozen die-cast cars. The second was a vintage GI Joe doll, its submachine gun pointed out at its new owner from the inside of the plastic film. The third, a book whose pages the boy had no desire to read. It was from his father, an avid reader, and not his mother, who probably didn't have any cognizance towards her son at all. His fourth present sat unopened in his lap, his fifth lay under the space-age tree's boughs, awkwardly on its side.

He had his father's dark eyes and heavy brow, his mother's light brown hair and delicate chin. He was built like his father, lean and small, like a miniature greyhound. He had watched his parents his entire life and he wondered why they were still together, since neither of them paid a bit of attention to the other. He was in school; there were plenty of kids in his class with broken-up parents. Then again, what he had was better than some. His friend Corey's father and mother had screaming matches when Corey had friends over; another friend, Maxie's, father was doing twenty to life for raping and then killing her older half sister. His teacher Mrs. Wimberley had horrible bruises on her arms and legs and more than once had come to school with a black eye (just since school had begun in August).

He had his father's quick, shallow temper and his mother's cool understanding of everything. His father's disregard for authority and his mother's insane compulsion to do everything right. His father's icy incapability to understand other points of view and his mother's quiet oblivion to other people's feelings.

He started and took a deep breath. He looked down at the box in his lap with a fair amount of surprise, wondering how it had gotten there since he didn't remotely remember picking it up in the first place. A typical five-year-old boy for once, he tore off the paper; a miniature chemistry set with real chemicals. The little bit of index card on the top said, "Love, Mum," in her precise, spidery handwriting.

The story of his sad little life.

He put the chemistry set down and cleaned up the wrapping paper. He left the fifth present unopened. After he'd put the crumpled wrapping paper in its proper, trash can grave, he went back to his bedroom and changed out of his pajamas. After carefully folding the green moose-printed flannel, he put on jeans and a striped tee shirt. He put on woolly white socks and combed his hair. He pulled a light jacket on and glanced out at the lonely palm tree that grew outside their building. Its fronds were still, so he didn't bother with a hat. He pulled sandals onto his chubby, five-year-old feet and opened the door to the terrace. A rush of salty, Pacific air hit him and he smiled. He left the door open and went to the front door.

A last glance back at the silver tree, the socks, the teapot, and the shoeboxes, and he went out into the skinny vinyl tiled hallway between the two apartments on their floor. The old woman who lived across the way had her entire family there with her to celebrate the holiday. Her surly teenage grandson Curtis, who lived with her, was sitting on a milk crate outside, smoking a cigarette and looking very James Dean in his red leather jacket.

"Hey, little man," Curtis called. "You getting the paper?"

"Don't have a subscription any more," he told Curtis. "My dad forgot to pay it again."

"Bummer. I'll see if Grams wants to give you ours when she's done, but I warn you, she might use it to line the bird's cage." The batty old woman had an African Grey parrot who would be outliving all of them a few times over. His name was Gino and he was intolerably spoiled.

"Nah, don't worry about it. Nobody in there reads it anyway. They like fiction better'n reality." He was five, but he'd been fed a steady diet of words and culture since before he could remember. He had a better vocabulary than Curtis, who spoke English sluggishly and reluctantly as though it was his second language. 

"Where you going, anyway?" Curtis asked, a tow-colored eyebrow raised. "It's, like, ten o'clock on Christmas morning."

"I'm going down to sit and watch cars go past and wait for my mom to come home. Dad's passed out again and my presents are so typically from them." His parents had no idea who he was. His parents had no idea who the other was. He had a perfectly clear image of who they were, though. That's why he didn't bother buying them presents. He didn't suppose it was wise to buy things for walking corpses.

Curtis stood up. "Mind if I come, too? There's way more Christmas cheer in there than I can stand and I think my head might go 'boom' if I don't get away from this door." He flicked his burnt out cigarette down to the rusted coffee can beside his grandmother's doorstep.

The little boy nodded and smiled amicably. "Sure."

The made their way down to the badly painted bench in front of their building. It was a disgusting mauve color and rather looked like someone had eaten some perfectly nice petunia petals and then regurgitated the mess onto a metal bench frame. 

"D'you bring a book?" Curtis asked.

"Do you want me to read today?" the boy replied, an eyebrow arched. Honestly, he hadn't brought one because he didn't feel like reading. He didn't feel like doing anything; his grandmother, who he'd only ever spoken to on the phone, would have laughed that tinkly laugh of hers and said that he was too little to be a punk rocker. He didn't think he was apathetic, his current 'big word,' but an entire lifetime of apathetic parents and Christmas presents for someone who wasn't really him had taken their toll.

"Well, duh," Curtis replied. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his bomber jacket and looked at the little boy expectantly. "Dude," he said when he didn't move, "it's okay if you don't want to. I'm sweet with just watching cars."

The boy's lips quirked into an odd smile. "Are we thinking comic, short, or novel?" he asked, giving in.

Curtis grinned. "I think something hard and simple." He looked thoughtful, incongruously so. "The Hobbit."

The boy stared at him. "The Hobbit?" he asked incredulously. "You want me to read you The Hobbit?" 

"Well, yeah. I mean, you're all small and I know your dad's got hairy feet--am I right or am I right? - so it just seems right, y'know?"

"If I'm going to read you anything it'll be the Council of Elrond in the actual trilogy because it takes place on December twenty-fifth," the boy replied calmly. He wasn't an incredibly festive person but some things just happened to be sacred. His mother had taught him one thing: always read something that happened on that day or that season. You read White Oleander in fire season, she told him, because so much of the book is about surviving ashes. You read Bridget Jones in the winter because it's snowy through half the book. You read Hemmingway in the summer because it's hot in Spain and Italy's prettiest right before autumn comes. Et cetera. 

Curtis gave him an odd look, like he couldn't quite catch up to where he was, the look a drowning victim must give an Olympic gold medallist. He sighed and nodded. "Yeah, Curtis, I'll go up and get my dad's book."

"You rock, kid," Curtis told him, ruffling his hair.

He hopped off the bench and hurried up the stairs to his haunted second floor apartment. He pushed the door open gingerly so as not to wake his father up. The man could sleep through an earthquake above seven on the Richter scale (and had) but the slight sound of a door opening could wake him up. He glanced around the living room, at the ruinous future tree and its Spartan glass ornaments (jewel crimson, canopy green, and Nassau blue), the cold symbolism of his unopened present, and the table supporting every scrap of what his father was. His father's books were in the kitchen cupboards, a logical place since none of them cooked and the boy was the only one who didn't survive on nothing but coffee and sighs or painkillers and cigarettes.

He found a ratty copy of The Hobbit in the "World Lit" cupboard next to the one under the sink, sandwiched between something Voltaire and The Prince (his father wanted to be Machiavelli). He glanced at the one-volume edition of the trilogy with a bit of regret, but didn't touch it. 

He walked past his parents' closed bedroom door on his way out of the kitchen and to the front door. As he passed, and although he didn't realize it, he felt the first tendrils of his father's ghost escaping, the first atoms flew screaming into oblivion through the particleboard door. The boy wouldn't notice what the shivering spell that fell over him at that moment actually was until much later, sitting on a metal stool in a chemistry class in a Connecticut high school. He would go home and ask his mother about it, and she would stare at him in wonder and sadness and then look away.

She always looked away.

*****

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posted boxing day '03

[t. henneth]


	2. with

Drowning In the Next Room

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Section Two of Three

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Summary: In the morning you're a child, happy and free. In the afternoon, you're an adult and you're breathing but the life inside is fading. In the evening, well, in the evening you lie down to die. That's your life in one day. That's one day of your life. An exercise in style [stark/dreamscape/anon]. [future.lit.rambler]

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Note: Stark means that certain details were kept skeletal. That makes the prose more visceral. That makes it all more rigid, and somehow still able to have an intense emotional impact. Dreamscape is the use of more otherworldly-sounding words to describe things, like calling baby blue something like lullaby blue. Anon is the technique in which the main characters have no names, but clues are given as to their identities. It should be pretty easy but whine all you want if you can't figure it out. This is the most complicated of the three sections because it has an extra speaking part in it (whom I adore) and because it jumps ahead just a little at the end. 

*

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They're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone.

She watched him as he watched the encore presentation football game on the dirty television screen above the top shelf. Its hazy blue-green-red glare matriculated down through the bottles of liquor there, illuminating Captain Morgan and the Grey Goose and backlighting the Bacardi bat through the white label. He complained loudly and tossed an uncracked peanut at the screen. She glanced up and saw that the other team had scored again. She rolled her eyes and took a sip of her Diet Coke.

She didn't know why she bothered trying to be with him, except she did and it didn't matter. She had a life and he had a life, and neither of these lives had a single thing in common besides the fact they were sleeping together to escape them. Her empty world consisted of her boyfriend's shoeboxes full of Percocet and Valium and Vicodin, sometimes cocaine, sometimes OxyContin, whatever. His empty world consisted of his wife's haphazard stacks of medical journals and patient ID files. They both had children in their separate lives-- children they didn't know, children who didn't know them. The only emotional stimulus either of them got in a week was from each other because her boyfriend (who'd never mustered up the decency to marry her after getting her pregnant) and his wife (whose sense of decency had been magnified about a thousand times by her stint in a Seventh Day Adventist university) were both dead inside and closed off to hide the fact.

And, of course, she loved him dearly. Maybe more than she loved herself.

She had answered his telephone call on Christmas Eve, fully expecting it to be her younger sister or her mother or even her grandmother. But it had been him, sounding like he needed her. So she had agreed to meet him at whatever dive bar they ended up at for the little Christmas cheer she'd be getting. She was just as big a junkie for him as any of her boyfriend's customers were for what he sold. The only good thing about living with a dealer was that she didn't have to work and neither of them had to pay taxes. Even if she did feel like her Yale education was going to waste. Even if she did feel mightily unfulfilled.

They'd gotten drunk as they could, gone to his apartment (he had it to get away from his wife and kids at his real it's-a-house-but-not-a-home), and had woken up with matching hangovers. She got up first, had briefly wondered about her son, regretted ruining his Christmas for selfish reasons, but forgot when he stirred and kissed her collarbone. She never wondered if what she was doing was wrong because she had no binding tie to her boyfriend outside of a son none of them cared much about. She wondered all the time about how wrong his part in their affair was, since he had three kids and a doctor wife and a proper, upstanding citizenship to uphold. She was, after all, just the casual live-in girlfriend of a fucking drug dealer. 

That whole morning they stayed in bed and did normal, married-people things like not having sex and reading and ignoring each other. At two o'clock he got up and made some canned tomato soup and grilled cheese. She got dressed and after they ate their ever-so-impressive Christmas dinner, they went back to the bar to watch whatever game ESPN was showing.

He glanced over at her and reached out to touch her hand. She moved unconsciously before he could make contact and he only touched her glass, getting nothing but a fingertip covered in condensation. He shifted his attention completely to her and made a move to touch her again. This time she stayed put, watching her hand disappear beneath his.

She had lost a lot of weight, he could tell. Her cheeks seemed hollower. Her hand was bonier. Her clothes were too big and she hated to shop. 

"I'm trying to escape something I can't escape," she said in an odd, strangled kind of voice. It wasn't true, though. She could have walked away from it all at any time, not looked back, and never regretted a single step taken.

He shrugged. "Hey, babe, so is everybody else in the world," he told her and leaned over to kiss her temple. She looked down at the bar and then closed her eyes.

"I'm pregnant," she told him. His hand slipped off of her shoulder and she didn't have to look up at his face to know what his expression looked like. "I know, I'm stupid, drinking and all. Really, fetal alcohol syndrome only happens if both parents are severe alcoholics and the mother drinks pretty steadily all through her pregnancy. I've never understood why people are so manic about pregnant women. A baby's going to be fucked up anyway by the time it's done being a baby, so why try to keep it all safe and sequestered, right?" She opened her eyes and glanced up at him. He had a mild, tense look about him-- jaw clenched and eyes blinking rapidly. She smiled to herself and reached over to touch his hand much the way he tried to touch hers. He did not flinch away, just turned his head and looked down at her helplessly.

"Is it mine?" he asked. 

She sighed and sat up straight. "I'd assume, since I haven't slept with him-- I mean really slept with him like that-- in months and obviously--" she moved the flap of her coat to one side so he could see exactly how thin she really was "--I'm not months into anything. I've done this before, honey. Don't worry."

"Yeah, I have, too." He blinked again. "I'm married," he said.

She rolled her eyes. "Aware of that. Had the imprint of that etching that's around your gold band on my thigh this morning. Kind of hurt. That ring's abrasive--"

"You don't understand," he said in a tepid voice. "I'm married. This puts a very ugly light on this. What will we tell people? Can we say anything?" He bit his lip and looked at her with troubled eyes.

She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at him. She said nothing for a moment as she studied him, letting his comfort level drop until just before she knew he would snap. His jaw was beginning to quiver. She wondered for a moment, nihilistically with a smirk, if this was anything like how he reacted when his wife told him she was pregnant the first time. Then again, it was okay for his wife to be pregnant.

She swirled her Diet Coke around in her glass, for no other reason than she wanted to. "I think I'm going to go home to Connecticut," she said. She felt oddly like she was floating, for all her honesty. She wasn't accustomed to it.

"Why?" he asked. It never occurred to him that maybe she just wanted him to suddenly think he'd never known her at all.

"I don't like who I am right now. I mean, I don't even recognize myself at all. Do you know how annoying that is?" She smiled darkly at him and passed him the rest of her glass. His bottle of Michelob was empty. "I don't even like Diet Coke all that much."

He drained her glass and looked at her seriously. "Do you want me to come with you?"

She raised her eyebrow at him and her dark smile faded a little. She hadn't spoken to her mother on the phone in a month. She hadn't seen her mother's face in person since before her son was born. The woman was probably still horribly disappointed in her for not living up to all the great expectations the family had had for her, still angry that she'd gone and followed in her footsteps with this second baby. Her mother had married one man and had gotten pregnant by another a year later. It was all too fucking nauseating. Then, that might have just been the Diet Coke. She was really starting to hate Diet Coke.

Diet cocaine, though-- that would be a novel and welcome concept. She wondered briefly if her boyfriend could get her some of that, then she remembered she would have to wait a few months until after she gave birth because cocaine does wonky things to fetuses.

"Tell Lane I said hello," she said sadly; he nodded. "And that I won't be able to make our lunch date next Tuesday. I hope she'll understand." She stood up. "I'm going to go." She pulled her white leather jacket on and smoothed her dark hair behind her ears. He stood up too and awkwardly put his arms around her. He wasn't sure what else to do. He thought there ought to be a manual telling men what to do when their mistresses informed them of a pregnancy. 

Adultery for Dummies, maybe.

"Why didn't you tell me last night?" he whispered in her ear. She shivered, because she'd been wondering the same thing since she'd woken up. He held her tightly. She was tempted to rest her head against his shoulder but she knew that they had reached their ending and it would do no good for her to do anything but take her bow.

She mustered up her best marzipan smile and pulled back. "I forgot," she said simply. "I wasn't thinking about me, you know. I was thinking about you last night. I was thinking about how nice you are and how good in bed you are. And how much I wanted to just be with you. It just slipped my mind."

He stared at her with blank disbelief. She picked up her purse and slipped past him and out into the California sunlight.

She walked home, it wasn't too far away, thinking about what had brought her out west and coming up with no definitive answer. She'd gotten pregnant with her son right after her Yale graduation, completely by accident, which is how all decent human beings are conceived. It's the planned ones that go awry later in life. She was an accident herself. She liked to think of herself as a normal, if somewhat amoral, creature. She supposed often that she should have just given the baby up. He might have gotten the family he deserved, a mommy and a daddy who were normal and who were never too preoccupied or too afraid to tell him how much they loved him.

She stayed so her son could know his father. She had never really known her own father until she was in her early teens, and she knew that no matter how amazing her mother was in everyway, there were blue-moon times when she wished she had a daddy. She'd been six months pregnant and on the phone with the baby's father for the first time since the conception when she took a deep breath and told him what she had previously been to afraid to do. He'd taken it rather well, considering. She moved cross-country for her baby; endured six days of train stations and cafeteria car food and a berth half the size of her Yale dormitory mattress.

When she turned the corner to the block her apartment building was on, she wasn't incredibly surprised to see her son sitting on the bench outside, watching the unusually sparse traffic. Their building was on the only residential property in an otherwise commercially zoned area. The intricate wrought iron bench was small and painted a purplish mauve by an unsteady hand. It matched the silk flowers in the window boxes to the first floor offices. He had his feet up on the bench and his arms wrapped around his knees. She wondered if Curtis had been sitting with him for a while. The two boys liked to do that, just sitting and watching cars go by. Sometimes her son would read out loud the only literature Curtis was likely to have ever heard. Sometimes they would play their GameBoys.

She came up the walk and sat down beside her son's feet. "Afternoon," she greeted him pleasantly.

He glanced up and squinted at her even though the sun was on the other side of the building. She looked up at her bedroom window and sighed when all she saw was darkened ceiling and the fluttering of lima bean green curtains. "Afternoon," he replied.

The two of them sat like that for quite a while. She wondered if the surf was more tempestuous than usual or if it was always that way and she just never noticed but for the noise made by visitors to the beach. She supposed the little boy next to her would know but she couldn't work out a way to ask him and not sound like a stranger. Even though it was on the other side of the building and two football field lengths from the edge of the yard, she could hear every crash. It just didn't feel like Christmas in California, a place utterly without snow, a place with its blue cellophane sky and particleboard palm trees. She had a hard time feeling jolly about anything and a horrible time convincing herself that this was the holiday she'd grown up with being simply for the construction of snowmen and her mother's abundant consumption of little splashes of eggnog in tall glasses of rum.

"Forecast's for a storm," the boy said in his typical monotone. She put her hand on the top of his sandal and smiled at him.

"We should go in, then," she said. He shrugged and hopped to his feet. She followed him up the two flights of stairs to the tiled hall between their door and their neighbors'. The sounds of a family celebrating the holiday by singing carols in loud, tone-deaf voices permeated the whole floor. She had always envied the people across the hall for getting the ocean view, but her boyfriend loved the view of the city.

"Okay," he agreed and they went inside. 

It wasn't until very late that night when she was sitting in a hospital corridor with her back pressed hard up against a smooth white plaster wall and her tailbone ground into a liquid nitrogen tile floor that she realized she had left the bar without saying goodbye, without telling him how much he was loved.

Cowardice is the only true form of security. Even more so than malice.

*****

[posted] le 28 décembre 2003

[t. henneth]


	3. Disappointment

Drowning In the Next Room

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Section Three of Three

Summary: In the morning you're a child, happy and free. In the afternoon, you're an adult and you're breathing but the life inside is fading. In the evening, well, in the evening you lie down to die. That's your life in one day. That's one day of your life. An exercise in style [stark/dreamscape/anon]. [future.lit.rambler]

__

Note: Stark means that certain details were kept skeletal. That makes the prose more visceral. That makes it all more rigid, and somehow still able to have an intense emotional impact. Dreamscape is the use of more otherworldly-sounding words to describe things, like calling baby blue something like lullaby blue. Anon is the technique in which the main characters have no names, but clues are given as to their identities. It should be pretty easy but whine all you want if you can't figure it out.

*

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You could have it all, my empire of dirt.

He could buy her anything, he could, but he couldn't buy her. He supposed it was his fault. He had an awful way with people, especially the ones he claimed to love oh-so-deeply. That is, if he could find it in him to do so. 

He didn't especially love her anymore, he supposed. She didn't love him anymore, and really, that was the whole reason he felt himself pulling away. To save face. In his world, that was quite all right. In his world, nobody was ever wrong, except maybe himself. A nice, tidy masochistic existence well insulated by the Valium. 

Kick in already, damn it!

He glared at the orange bottle on his bedside table. It laid on its side, a few pills spilled out of its jagged mouth. The white child safety cap was discarded nearby. A can of Seagram's ginger ale and a half-drunk bottle of Killian's sat nearby. Both drinking vessels had rings of condensation around their bases, soaking into the shiny particle board surface of the table. She was going to kill him. Wait-- guess that didn't matter so much any more.

A toxic level of Darvocet is about twenty pills for a grown man accustomed to prescription painkillers, less for a woman, less for a teenage boy. He'd seen it happen twice, someone taking too much and keeling over because of it. The first time he'd been so high himself it had been uproariously funny. It had been his much older step cousin Genevieve, the twit, who dramatically flattened the back of her hand against her forehead and declared in a horrible travesty of a Southern accent that she could bear no more of the world and wouldn't he just please let her have some of his lovely pills to help her out? Being fucked up himself, he handed her the whole bottle, which she promptly uncapped and dumped half of into her mouth. She grabbed the bottle of Bacardi from the man next to her and washed half of her mouthful down in one gulp, the rest in a second. She laughed, kissed the man, gave him back his Bacardi, and promptly passed out. She never regained consciousness.

Tragic, really. She had two mulatto bastard kids and a mortgage, not to mention about five reams of credit card debt.

He laid back and stared at the shadowy ceiling, wondering what exactly it was that had led him to be locked up in his bedroom on Christmas night. His little boy quietly opened his presents that morning while his girlfriend did God-knows-what a city away. The rest of the universe had the supreme audacity to pick up and carry on as though he were the most insignificant thing in the world, the silly man trying to kill himself with the very thing that kept them in the apartment in the first place. 

The second time he watched someone die hadn't been quite so funny. For one thing, he had been completely sober. For another, it had been his ex-girlfriend Mel's younger brother, Josh. He'd met Mel at his father's hotdog stand. Mel, the beautiful, tormented, artistic college dropout. Mel, who served hotdogs with a bored abandon that his father had never seen before and was fascinated by. Mel who was a former dancer and current on-the-side hard-core porn star. Mel, whose daily coke habit leveled off at about three hundred dollars. Mel, who was willing to do pretty much anything for her drugs. That was actually how their relationship began. He had just started dealing, mostly as a way to get away from his books and memories and his father. It was easy money, hugely entertaining, and he got to carry a gun. She was no ingenue at the process, he realized about the time she tried (between a jar of relish and the grill) to haggle him down to five bucks for a Valium, which everyone should know doesn't work and if someone tries to sell you one for so cheap, they're not Valiums you're about to buy. 

Mel was the oldest of five children, the youngest being the only boy, Josh. With just six years between the oldest and the youngest of five children, the family was close-knit and so very Midwestern. Mel had pictures of all her siblings everywhere. She broke up with him because Josh got his lethal dose of Darvocet from him. Josh was a sad boy, small and lithe with dark hair, unlucky and sarcastic at all the wrong times. He hadn't known that Josh was going to down all the pills himself. He was used to people coming and buying in bulk to sell with a markup to make profit at a party or whatever. He'd never been party to a suicide, so he hadn't anticipated that anyone would do such a thing.

Thing was, he really had liked the kid. Mel broke up with him at her brother's funeral, her mascara all smeared down below her eyes even though she insisted she used the waterproof variety.

He rolled over and stared at the wall for a while. He couldn't look up because his vision was stating to go, which was such a relief. He couldn't look at the bottle because he didn't want to start to regret his actions. He supposed he could have easily gotten up, gone to the kitchen to get some grain alcohol chaser to wash down the rest of the bottle to speed the process up but he really didn't want to bother.

The bedclothes, baby fern green sheets and a ratty chamois-colored fleece blanket, were bunched up sadly around his legs. His left foot hung off the edge of the bed, uncovered and cold from the air conditioning in the room. He could hear the sounds of television and the Pacific Ocean on the other side of his door and he wondered if his family was there or not. He wondered what she would do when she found him, cold and blue-lipped in their bed. He wondered if she would cry, or if she'd just go pick up the phone and dial calmly like she had expected it for a long time coming.

The window above the bed looked out on a different vista of Los Angeles than the terrace. It glanced back at the ocean of yellow lights of the city. She had once told him-- back when she still loved him-- while they sat up on the roof that, on a hazy night, it looked like the whole valley was on fire. In fire season when there was a little smoke in the air, the effect was magnified. In the rainy season, it looked crisper and darker. He didn't have to sit up and look out to see the dim gray-violet sky to know the last sun of his life had already set, had gone to set on Hawaii before rising on Australia and Japan. He could look straight ahead at the lullaby blue wall and pray that his death wouldn't involve vomiting.

He wondered back to when he'd started the dealing thing. It had probably been when his best friend Archie brought him to this Hollywood C-list party, full of callow, wannabe actors and porn queens looking for their big break and balding producers and casting agents looking for an easy score. Archie was seeing this cockstar (the industry name for a candy boy, he didn't ask why Archie with his two little kids was seeing a gay porn guy), and that cockstar (named Nate) only did what he did so that he could pay for his habits. Nate knew this girl called Scam with waist-length, blue-green hair and more black eye makeup than Alice Cooper. She dealt for her cousin, Stan. Stan was at the party, Alice Cooper Girl was there, and Archie had brought him so Nate could hook him up with Stan and Scam. He slept with Scam that night, got a gun the next day from Stan, and entered the world he would inhabit for the next decade. 

The next party he went to, he was big drug dealer guy. There were more Hollywood types there, too, than the last. And they were coming to him, the young, pretty upstart, for their stuff instead of Archie or one of the others. Three raves later, he was dealing to A-listers. And he was twenty-three.

That was when his uncle had a baby with a married woman and he'd gone to stay with him to help smooth them over. He'd met up with a high school girlfriend, who was incidentally his new cousin's sister if he had to be technical. And, of course, he promptly got her pregnant, though he didn't know it until the end of the second trimester when she mustered up the _huevos_ to call him and then move out to California.

He had seriously considered giving up selling the drugs forever the first time he held his son in his arms. As horrible and cliché and uncharacteristic as it had been for him to think it, he'd just been so awestruck that anything that shared genetic material with him could be so perfect and gorgeous. A tiny baby staring up at him with mirror-image sable eyes, wondering who the hell the man holding him was and where his mother had gotten to. 

Then, he realized that selling drugs was his only real marketable skill and he had to support the kid in his arms somehow.

He stared at the wall and waited. He listened to the front door open and the voices of his family come inside before one of them slammed the door shut behind himself or herself. He wondered if they would be able to hear his last breath through the two cheap layers the bedroom door was composed of. Maybe through the crack underneath the door.

"I love you," he heard her voice saying to the boy. "I want you to know that even though I'm the worst mother in the world and I can't show you. It's never because I don't love you, because I do. I'm leaving your father, though. I have to get out of here. I just want to know if you want to come to Connecticut with me or if you want to stay with him."

He rolled over to face the door with a frown stretched across his brow. He suddenly felt like he had been underwater for too long and was choking on the liquid surrounding him. A look in the mirror would have revealed blue lips and pale juniper-stained skin reminiscent of a newborn baby. His hands were beginning to shake. He had no feeling left from about his chest down. The room was going hazy-dim, and he knew it wasn't just his suicidal dose of Darvocet doing it to him. 

If only she would come into the room and feel his pulse drop like the New Year's ball of light. He'd gone to Times Square with his mother once, when he was six and still controllable. They'd gotten there on December twenty-ninth and were bundled within inches of their lives, but they were in the frontmost row. He couldn't remember having felt quite so happy since that day a thousand years earlier.

Really, he was starting to wonder if he would have to take another handful to get an effect at all. Maybe seven years' worth of selling and skimming a snippet for himself had built him up a higher than normal toxicity defense. Truthfully, he didn't care all that much. It wasn't suicide so much as an angry lashing-out at the world. He was such a normal human being, quiet and dependant and covetous and he hated it. He liked to think he was more sophisticated than the rest of the world with their trivial ways. Many times in his life he had spoken this idea, and every time he told it, it sounded sour to his own ears and it tasted like old vinegar in his throat, mainly because he was just a regular boy packaged in a taut little Italian shell with an inferiority complex and a nicotine addiction.

Once his uncle had snidely asked him, "So, what exactly are you rebelling against?" to which he snidely replied, "Whaddaya got?"

Suicide is the ultimate rebellion because it's fighting the simple human (animal?) nature of trying to stay alive. That and the fact he was bored and the only thing nobody else in the world really knew about was the experience of death. And he knew everything he'd ever wanted to know. He had everything he'd ever wanted. He had done everything he'd wanted to do. So, there was nothing left to explore, nothing left to hold his mind in a spell. 

There wasn't anything left to dream.

*****

I want to thank Anna and Cel and Green Eve for the inspiration (in whichever form it took), Tony Berbelis for unknowingly providing the quotes, blink-182 for whichever song on their new album that features the lines "drowning in the next room" and "cold with disappointment," Casey and John just because, and my little six-year-old, The-Hobbit-reading cousin Johnny for being the model for Rory and Jess' son. 

Lorelai married Digger, by the way. 

And, I'd like to add that maybe Jess read to his son when he was little, and maybe Rory's detached because she's unhappy-- plenty of people change with malcontent, fuck you if you can't accept this.

[posted] le 30 décembre 2003

[t. henneth]


End file.
